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Why New Relic

Provides an easy-to-use solution for monitoring platform operations, user experience, and business performance

Highlights

Drastically reduced time required to troubleshoot performance problems from several days to a few hours in MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution)

Increased uptime to 99.99%

Significantly reduced exceptions and errors with minimal effort, while eliminating over 60% of exceptions within two business days

Work Market Sees Application Performance and Internal Collaboration Soar After Deploying New Relic

When New York-based Work Market was founded in 2010, the sharing economy was in its infancy, and Work Market co-founder and President Jeff Wald recognized there was a large problem with how enterprises staffed and managed their freelancers and independent workers. He saw an opportunity to create an enterprise-scale freelance management system (FMS) with a web-based marketplace that connects large enterprises with a pool of freelancers—quickly, easily, and successfully. Today, more than 1,000 businesses rely on that platform to manage their freelance workforce, and Work Market has been recognized as one of New York’s fastest-growing companies.

Empowering teams through APM

When Chris Handy, senior DevOps engineer, and Yujin Kim, director of operations, joined Work Market less than a year ago they found a technology platform in transition. Like most companies at the time, Work Market had launched its web-based marketplace for enterprises and freelancers as a single monolithic application. However, over the years, both technology and the company’s services had evolved, and it now made more sense to chunk out that application as branded microservices that worked within the platform but were owned by different groups and serve different customer segments.

Explains Kim, “Work Market has three primary components: employers, workers, and the thing in between that connects them; our marketplace. While in the past, one site and one team served all three, now those responsibilities are separating as we move into a microservice-based architecture. This means that the number of teams and applications DevOps is supporting is multiplying. The only way we can keep pace with that expansion is to empower those teams to monitor the performance of their own applications and to work cooperatively to make informed decisions for the business.”

None of that would be possible, however, without the right tool, and Kim and Handy knew exactly what that tool should be. Both had worked with New Relic APM in previous jobs. And both were happy to find it already deployed at Work Market.

“As soon as I was able to access the New Relic accounts, I started digging around, and it became clear that the platform’s built-in reporting was the culprit for at least some of the application performance issues. Thanks to New Relic, I could see which part of the code was doing what and how it was affecting the database, and that made it easy to isolate the problem.”

Yujin Kim
Director of Operations

Bringing clarity and insight to software performance

Indeed, when Kim joined the company, the site was experiencing a few performance issues that were affecting user experience. Once he realized that Work Market had deployed New Relic APM several months prior, Kim knew he could begin to tackle the problems immediately. “As soon as I was able to access the New Relic accounts,” he says, “I started digging around, and it became clear that the system’s built-in reporting was the culprit for at least some of the issues. Thanks to New Relic I could see which part of the code was doing what and how it was affecting the database, and that made it easy to isolate the problem.”

This kind of troubleshooting and performance monitoring continues today as Work Market tries to get a handle on every aspect of its business with New Relic-provided data. Says Kim, “There are three things we use New Relic to measure on a daily, weekly and monthly basis—browser rendering time, backend response time, and transactions per second. Every Monday, all of our executives gather, and we go over those metrics to determine whether we’re meeting our KPIs.”

The measuring doesn’t stop there, however. As Work Market begins to chunk up its website, it plans to use New Relic to monitor how each area—Employers, Workers, and Marketplace—is doing with those metrics rather than just providing an overall measurement. And as it starts to develop separate applications for each area, it will be using New Relic's Key Transaction feature as well as Synthetics to help product owners identify and track the transactions most critical to Work Market’s business.

An Amazon Web Services customer since its earliest days, Work Market also uses New Relic to thoroughly vet any new service it rolls out before migrating it to the cloud—testing each build to determine whether the application is having a positive or negative impact on platform performance.

“One thing that I liked about New Relic right from the start was that it offered a common ground that enabled all these different teams—DevOps, Operations, Management, and more—to begin speaking the same language.”

Chris Handy
Senior DevOps Engineer

The enabling tool for the enabled team

A little over a year into Work Market’s deployment of New Relic, Handy and Kim continue to marvel at the speed and ease with which they are able to pinpoint and resolve issues based on the data it collects. For example, that issue with reports slowing system performance? According to Kim, they were able to isolate and address many issues right away - a process that before the introduction of New Relic would have taken weeks.

And with better data—effectively conveyed across the entire enterprise—comes better business decisions. Says Handy, “One thing that I liked about New Relic right from the start was that it offered a common ground that enabled all these different teams—DevOps, Operations, Management, and more—to begin speaking the same language. Finally, they were all viewing the same metrics from within the same tool. This was the key to our teams working more collaboratively.”

About Work Market

Work Market is the leading provider of on-demand labor software for the enterprise. Recognized as one of America’s Most Promising Companies by Forbes, Work Market is helping some of today’s biggest brands modernize their approach to talent management. To learn more, visit www.workmarket.com.